Wyss, Legate, Friedman, Mills.. Where's the 427 book???

[dbn04]

Trevor,
i think you were in untill you said: paying for gas

[Trevor Legate]

Tried to sneak that in under the radar - keep quiet, maybe nobody will notice.....

[Mark IV]

Originally Posted by Historybuff

As long as we are talking about Yates, I enjoyed his book Of Death and Time, mostly about Indy racing in '55 (with a little bit of James Dean's death thrown in,)
until at the end of the book I realized that he had said at the outset that a fictional reporter was going to be employed throughout. So that meant that every quote in the book from race drivers and such didn't happen because if the reporter didn't exist there was no witness to what each person quoted said. I used a few paragraphs done in a similar fly-on-the-wall style to set the opening scene in my book but the chapters that follow employ real quotes wherever possible. So while a Yates on Shelby book would be fun to read and very flamboyant , I don't want to read it if that damn fictional reporter comes back.

(And what section of the library does the librarian put such a book, in fiction or non-fiction?)

Actually, in our local library (which happens to be in Lockport, NY....Yate's home town) they have it in the "Local Authors" section (along with Joyce Carol Oates and Bevla Lockwood) AND in the "sports" section. I read it and enjoyed it but took it with a grain of salt as it is a "docudrama" and not a straight historical tome.

[DTurnbull]

^ Point well taken, Trevor. Now, can you help me find your earlier books for less than an arm & a leg?

(PS - I just noticed the A98 pictures you posted. THANK YOU! God, that is one beautiful car!)

[Trevor Legate]

[quote=DTurnbull;853808

(PS - I just noticed the A98 pictures you posted. THANK YOU! God, that is one beautiful car!)[/QUOTE]

...to be joined by two more, one for the road, one for the track, some time soon!

[Woodz428]

Friedman?? Kinky Friedman?? I didn't realize he was a Cobra enthusiast. I bet he could write a great book about Cobras...

[A-Snake]

Originally Posted by Woodz428

Friedman?? Kinky Friedman?? I didn't realize he was a Cobra entusiast. I bet he could write a great book about Cobras...

I wonder if Kinky would put too much of a Texas spin to it?

[DTurnbull]

Originally Posted by Trevor Legate

...to be joined by two more, one for the road, one for the track, some time soon!

It's about time. Where do I order one?

[Jamo]

Trev...seems to me the tough market you describe may be due to folks writing and including glossy pics of the wrong Cobra model.

Ok...Baywatch. Anyone remember the names of any of the females besides Pamela Anderson? Anyone care if they were better swimmers?

[hey,littlecobra]

Yasmin Bleef or something like that.
excellent swimmer i'm sure, as well as some other lovely attributes.

(haha.... nice correlation. )

[mrmustang]

Originally Posted by Jamo

Ok...Baywatch. Anyone remember the names of any of the females besides Pamela Anderson? Anyone care if they were better swimmers?

I had a thing for Nicole Eggert

[Jamo]

Not trying to get off track, and while it does give some creedence to the commentary from Wally World, the fact is that Pam helped create an entire genre of houseboating videos.

I love all of the 289 variants...truth be told I like pre-Cobra ACs (I'd love to have a "moustache")...but the fact remains that an entire generation of folks (most of us here) grew up with the 427 cars firmly implanted in our minds, and it would be a good addition to have a book on them (rather than a chapter or two) on the shelf.

[1ntCobra]

We know that Dave Friedman has plenty of pictures of the small block cobras and gt-40's, but that should be expected as he was the official Shelby American photographer. Since Shelby did not actually race the 427 much (I think 3002 was only raced by the factory a handful of times), that could explain a minimal number of pictures of 427 cars on Dave's part. Perhaps many of the books with historical race pictures rely of getting pictures from Dave as sort of a easy place to get a good variety of pictures. So it might require a lot more work to track down a bunch of different photographers to get a decent enough collection of period 427 cobra pictures.

[Maricopa]

I want another book with just street cars in it. I get tired of leafing past all those beat-up race cars trying to find the pretty ones.

[Power Surge]

Originally Posted by Maricopa

I want another book with just street cars in it. I get tired of leafing past all those beat-up race cars trying to find the pretty ones.

The beat up race cars ARE the pretty ones.

(to me at least)

[computerworks]

Originally Posted by 1ntCobra

.... that could explain a minimal number of pictures of 427 cars on Dave's part.

I believe he left the company after 1965, so he was not really there for the majority of the 427 production run.

[1ntCobra]

Originally Posted by computerworks

I believe he left the company after 1965, so he was not really there for the majority of the 427 production run.

Hmm... Dave's Shelby GT40 book goes thru 1967.

[computerworks]

Originally Posted by 1ntCobra

Hmm... Dave's Shelby GT40 book goes thru 1967.

...it would have to, to make any sense.

[1ntCobra]

I guess I just assumed that Dave continued to be the official Shelby American photographer thru 1967 if his GT40 book ended in 1967.

[Historybuff]

Tevor Legate is right--doing a proper book with all the right pictures and interviews is too expensive to do the way books are done nowadays. The publishers won't advance the monies needed to do the spade work.

The ideal example of a Cobra book presently on the market is Michael Schoen's Cobra-Ferrari wars. That book probably took over a year to do.Schoen is a lawyer and no doubt that profession taught him how to interview people. Plus he's an ultra enthusiast who has owned a Daytona coupe and many other Cobras.

He interviewed at least 50 people in doing the book. Travel costs today have doubled so
unless you have a lot of free airline miles it would cost several thousand to find all the people who can tell the tale.

Not only that, like writing about WWII,due to the passage of over 40 years, the original participants are fading fast. It's hard to believe our heroes like Bondurant are now over 70! I wager that half the people Schoen interviewed have died by now.

Publishers only come up with miniscule advances, $1000 or $2000, it's going to cost me that just to go to Monterey, and I live in Calif.! Nobody could set out to write a 427 Cobra book with less than about $10,000 expense money.

So it's going to take a writer that's independently wealthy, with knowledge of Sixties racing, who can devote the year or so of time

One example of a non publisher doing a bang-up job was George Stauffers book on the Cobra Daytona coupe. It cost $100 when the book was first published and is now about $750 used. (Clue: You can order it from the library that has it through your own library through a plan where you can order books from any library for $2) But George is a car dealer in (real) Cobras and GT40s and thus could write off the whole venture as promotion. He enlisted Brock, Friedman and one other ex-Shelby employee to produce it.

Another alternative is to have a club produce it but now that the SAAC club is at odds with Shelby
I can't see that happening --as some Shelby employees would probably refuse to "cross the pioket line" as it were and at any rate they would have to get the Registry out first to have any credibility before they could take orders on a new book that doesn't exist yet.I am not sure how long a time lapse you can have before ordering a book and getting it before some law is broken.

By the way, talking about Yates' book Of Time and Death where a fictional reporter tells the story one of the best selling books out now is called
Racing in the Rain which is
told from the viewpoint of a dog!

Pretty funny book, actually

I don't remember if it tells what kind of dog but I'd believe anything a Labrador Retriever tells me...